Folk music

Nathan Bissette, an English/American musician and composer, and Kristin Borgehed, Swedish dito, as well as co-founder of FPA, launched their album PurcellPartialsPietist in November 2016.

Performing at the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The duo was founded a few years ago, in Aberdeen, Scotland. The work is based in traditional singing and playing from central parts of Sweden/northeast Scotland, and consists mainly of improvisation and microtonality. String instruments and voices are the main instruments we work with.

This work has a practical side, as is shown on this CD, as well as a theoretical, through Kristin’s PhD studies on microtonality in singing. The repertoire includes a variety of tings, from dance music to church music, from lullabies to wordless humming.

Nathan playing the theorbo.

Participating in the international research conference “Beyond the semitone”.

The album has been very well received, and we look forward to travel around with this music in 2017. Kristin and Nathan would like to say thanks to the board of FPA for this kind contribution!

Here are links to the album, and also to our facebookpage, where all news about concerts etc appear!

Last Sunday we, five of nine singers from #koraleriet, sang chorales at the medieval inspired service in Heliga Kors church in Ronneby.

One of the chorales sung was the all-time-high-hit Den Signade Dag, which oldest found transmission in writing is dated to 1450.This chorale has been sung continuously for hundreds of years and ties together catholicism and protestantism.

Our version of melody was noted down by Nils Stålberg, and sung to him by Ingrid Isaksson, who lived in a small cottage in the village Röaby, some km north of Bräkne-Hoby in Blekinge.

The musical arrangements are made by Kristin Borgehed,after detailed analyses of how melody interacts with pronunciation patterns in that very local dialect.

At this year’s Korrö Folkmusic Festival FPA contributed with two happenings. A workshop mediating tunes with mainly Blekinge material and also one of my “seminar-concerts”, which I held on Thursday night. This time the theme was cultural connections around the Baltic Sea. I was happy to notice that the dark Old Mill (Kvarnen) soon was filled and that there seemed to be quite a crowd outside that couldn’t get in, due to both lack of space and high interest in the subject.

I took the audience on a path through experiences that we in Folk Practice Academy have collected from our projects Baltic Sea Inter Cult, Baltic Trad(e) and Basic – Folk & Tradition. But I also lifted som really interesting details of dance descriptions that Kristin and I have found in the archives of Nordiska Museet and through our meetings with old singers and fiddlers.

The audience showed a dedicated interest in the subject and several of them gave some nice feedback after the session; “This was the best I have ever experienced at Korrö!”, “You have to write a book!”, “This should be made into a film!”

It seems as if the subjects we constantly are poking at fill a need. People have an urge to talk about immaterial heritage. Where do cultural expressions derive from? How can we make a complex picture more understandable? How does geography, time, development, society, political implications, etc colour the way we perceive traditional music? And how can the music we love to play and sing be connected to knowledge allowing questions and discussions to flourish?

With me on stage, I also had my daughter Agnes, who is one of the dedicated youth we have in FPA, and she mastered the Polish drum with excellence while I played a couple of tunes from Suwalki.

I also managed to break a string while retuning, but having fiddlers in the audience is a true bliss. Thank you from all my heart, you anonymous who gave me a new G-string!

We are very pleased by the huge number of new readers finding our blog, several hundreds from all over the world!! Among our readers are a mix of musicians, people that sing and play in sessions or like to attend festivals, researchers, folk art nerds and people with local connection to the event we cover. Working with this broad audience has lead to a few changes in the website structure.

Folk Practice Academy, often called FPA, was founded by long term colleagues Astrid Selling and Kristin Borgehed in 2011.

Since Folk Practice Academy is an international organisation, our blog posts will be mostly in English, but at times also Swedish, Estonian, or any other of the languages of our associated partners.

This dynamic approach to language does also go for the section of our website called Articles&Reflections. Please feel free to share your thoughts with us, even if you prefer to not write in English!

The hashtag #libertéegalitétonalité will from now on be used for posts here and other social media, for posts related to Kristin Borghed’s PhD project at the University of Aberdeen. The project is called Tuning the Human Voice: An Empirical Exploration of Tonality in Northern Traditional Singing. Feel free to scroll down this page for a short info film.

This PhD project on singing traditions in northern Europe, is in close cooperation with Folk Practice Academy, in fact, the work is inseparably intertwined.

This is a picture of me, my mother Elisabeth Bjurström Jonzon, Malungsfors, Sweden and my aunt Anna Hedin, Malungsfors, Sweden. They are the two singers that have had the greatest impact on me in terms of songs, singing style, story telling, general life advice, as well as together with other relatives always helping my family when I have been away singing, recording and writing.

For more info of the project, please read here!! http://www.abdn.ac.uk/staffnet/profiles/r01keb12

For this years May singing, the 30 of April as every year, we launched the tags #sjungamaj, #folkpractice, #folkpracticeacademy. Launching a hashtag might seem like an everyday thing, but was really an important step in out work. (Another one for our female religious singing project is #koraleriet )

Here is the three year old start of the public project on May singing. This is a result of Astrid Selling’s own ethnographic research, connected via FPA through projects at Lunds Universitet, Linnéuniversitetet and Högskolan på Gotland.

For the modern ethnographic researcher, social media has many benefits apart from only being a fashionable (and measurable!) way of getting her work known to the public audience. What is more important is the possibilities it gives to collect research data, and to, through a constant dialogue with other people interested in ethnography, folk music, folk art, etc, build mutual confidences around our practice. This is often called field work, and may happen actually in the fields, as on our camps with Krusznia in Poland, or, by the computer. We are pleased and proud to say that this dialogue does currently involve most parts of Europe, and even beyond!!

If you have something you want to share with us – please use the tags for photos/films/music, or mail us at info@folkpractice.com!!